The Social Policy Digest went online in the summer of 2003. This means that the Digest, which used to be printed as part of the Journal of Social Policy, is now only available via the web.

A significant, and probably increasing, proportion of older people are ‘asset rich, income poor’. This raises a number of social policy issues around poverty and living standards in later life. For example, perhaps older people are ‘living poor to die rich’ because they wish to pass on their assets to future generations or because they feel they have an ‘inalienable right’ to their property. Or perhaps they would like to use up their assets but find this difficult, for example, because of concerns around equity release products. This article focuses on attitudes to assets and inheritance, drawing on findings from in-depth interviews and focus groups. The data suggest that people generally take a balanced and pragmatic attitude to their resources. They do not wish to ‘live poor to die rich’ but nor are they keen to spend their resources recklessly as they wish to leave something to their families, while also maintaining a reasonable standard of living in later life. It concludes by suggesting that the current ‘asset-based welfare’ debate should broaden its focus on asset accumulation to consider issues around asset use.

The centrality of patient choice in the recent political rhetoric of both New Labour and the Conservative Party has prompted a renewed interest in the shift towards a more consumerist conception of health care in the UK. Accordingly, this article reports on early findings from a project in the ESRC/AHRB Cultures of Consumption Programme, exploring how the ‘consumer’ is constituted in narratives of health reform, and the ways in which policy documents present a particular image of the consumer as a rationale for institutional and cultural change. The article then goes on to look at the ways in which service delivery organisations have responded to New Labour's consumerist imperative. Drawing upon a series of interviews with senior health care managers in two case study locations, the article highlights ways in which choice, responsibility and empowerment have become critical points at which a consumerist orientation is articulated with established professional cultures, and how health organisations have experienced – and attempted to resolve – the tensions that result.

This article derives from a two year study of ‘Home Supervision’, conducted as part of a programme of research on the Children (Scotland) Act 1995. The focus is on children looked after by the local authority who are on a legal supervision order at home, primarily as a consequence of having been abused or neglected, having offended or having failed to attend school without reasonable excuse. Two assumptions, both arguably a legacy of Lipsky, are challenged: first, that non-implementation by street-level bureaucrats is in opposition to their managers; and, second, the passivity of clients in respect of policy making. It is argued that the street-level bureaucrats and managers in the Home Supervision study share assumptive worlds in respect of children on home supervision, and that clients, as agentic actors, reveal a capacity for shaping policy at the implementation stage. These issues are explored and their implications for implementation studies and child welfare are discussed.

The rise of the third sector has been a global welfare phenomenon. In China, the growth of social organisations has been a remarkable feature of the transitional society after the adoption of market reforms and political liberalisation. In its emergent welfare economy, the third sector has been hailed as a new growth point in social care as the state retreats from direct provision of welfare services. This article examines non-state care homes for older people in urban China based on a survey of 137 homes in three cities. It begins with a brief review of the theory of the third sector, non-governmental organisations and private markets in the production of welfare. This is followed by a discussion of third-sector organisations, markets and the state in the special context of China. The next section appraises the factors that contribute to the surge of non-state residential provision for the elderly. The final part of the article presents empirical findings on the development, key features and authority relations of 137 non-state care homes for older people. It is argued that their uniqueness marks them out as a special form of third-sector organisation in China's welfare economy.

As a result of the consolidation of democracy and the spread of globalisation, the Korean welfare regime has undergone significant changes. This article examines the changes that have occurred since the 1990s. Overall social policy has benefited from a marked increase in expenditure since the 1990s. This has been especially visible in terms of the ratio of social expenditures to GDP, which reached 11 per cent by 1998. These changes in Korean social policy brought about a readjustment of the roles of both government and the private sector. The development of income maintenance programmes has been the core change within the Korean welfare regime. Unlike income maintenance programmes, public social services have developed at a rather sluggish pace. The provision of social services has long been regarded as the responsibility of the family and has changed relatively little in comparison to income maintenance programmes. Although Korean social policy has undergone remarkable changes, it would be erroneous to argue that a complete shift in the welfare regime has taken place.

Prioritisation of cases and resources as a means of rationing the limited legal aid budget has recently become a feature of access to justice in the UK. This article explores the utility of devising proxy models of ‘legal need’ as a means of enabling the rational and equitable planning of legal services in these circumstances. Different conceptual and methodological approaches are considered, highlighting preliminary development work in Scotland. The likelihood of developing ‘legal needs’ measures that promote equity of access to appropriate legal services is discussed in the light of problems with defining ‘legal need’ and the diversity of services available for the resolution of legal problems.

This article takes a fresh look at the intellectual context of the poor law in Britain and Ireland from the 1830s to the 1930s, and is focused on the different conceptions over time of the ‘service user’ as agent (drawing on Le Grand) in relation to a fundamental contrast between social theory which is ‘non-idealist’ and ‘idealist’ (drawing on Harris). It first examines the ideas of liberal tories, rather than Benthamites, in remodelling the poor law in England and introducing it to Ireland in the 1830s. Second, it explicitly draws a contrast between idealist and non-idealist social thought, relating it to the idealist nature of both the majority and minority reports on the poor law of 1909 and to the non-idealist thought of Spencer and the earlier discussion. The subsequent dominance of idealist thought in social policy theory and practice is then reviewed, considering Titmuss on agency, the ‘rediscovery’ of informal care in the 1970s as evidence of a shift to the non-idealist perspective that people can act as rational agents for their own well-being, and the resurgent influence of idealist thought on ‘New Labour’. The article concludes that links identified between ideas of agency and types of social theory since the 1830s enhance our understanding of debates today.

Financial exclusion is increasingly being recognised as an important aspect of socio-economic inequality where disadvantaged individuals and communities are isolated from mainstream financial services, particularly affordable and readily available credit. In the face of these problems, social policy initiatives have emerged that have travelled under various names: social investment, micro-finance, community finance and community development finance. These initiatives are seen as the basis of a ‘new economics’ that will create self-sustaining local economies. The government is also promoting community development finance as an aspect of community regeneration with the aim of providing credit to poor communities to stimulate local enterprise and thereby reduce dependency on state support. The same approach is being taken to grant-funded community and voluntary organisations to encourage them into a neo-market approach to the delivery of services. This article explores the phenomenon of community development finance and assesses its proposed role in community regeneration and in relation to the community and voluntary sector.